During the recently passed winter I was ill with some sort of combination of infection (which antibiotics merely lessened) and head cold and who knows what. During this period, I noticed my thinking, as reflected in my typing and sometimes my speech patterns, was on a definite cycle of maybe half a sentence, or a couple of seconds. Perhaps the working buffer with which I pretend to understand how our brain works had been foreshortened by my illness.
Therefore, this article D-brief on how nouns tend to interrupt our thinking and speaking patterns rang a bell for me:
The paper’s authors explain that it’s not just a study into verbal tics, but more of a window into how our brains process and create language. “When we speak, we unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others and sometimes pause. Such slowdown effects provide key evidence for human cognitive processes, reflecting increased planning load in speech production.” A gap between words, or having to result to filler words (such as uh or um), literally suggests certain words tax our mental faculties more than others.
And which words were those? Nouns (“a person place or thing,” as per Schoolhouse Rock), as opposed to verbs (which tell us “what’s happening”). Across languages and cultures, speakers universally slowed down before uttering nouns, and only one of the nine languages showed any slowdown before verbs, despite these often being more complex than nouns.
The authors went to great pains to make sure they studied speech from “linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world,” choosing languages from the Amazonian rainforest (Bora and Baure), Mexico (Texistepec), the North American Midwest (Hoocąk), Siberia (Even), the Himalayas (Chintang), and the Kalahari Desert (Nǁng)… plus English and Dutch. They also wanted to make sure they studied examples of spontaneous, naturalistic speech — nothing read out loud or memorized.
Sure, it’s not the same thing – but it’s interesting how the individual contents of our thoughts can have greater or lesser impact on our language processing capability.
